Neither Fish Nor Flesh
...The recent ubiquity of mermaids reflects the yearning to celebrate primal female energy in a culture that often denies it There have been a lot of mermaid sightings...
Foodland
...diverse interests in food space, culture, naturally built and virtual landscapes, and environmental issues. Rather than having a website where I write about everything that I find interesting, I force...
Can’t Take a Joke
An interview with Lauren Berlant
Book Review: The Beauty Experiment
...could hope for. There’s plenty of reasons to recommend this book: Baker Hyde’s skilled storytelling, the glimpses into her relationship with her husband and the culture surrounding her (she did...
Vapor Eyes
...are not only vaping but also consuming vaping culture. Moreover, they are reproducing complex social relations within the subculture. Every time they use their e-cig in public, users are reifying...
Romancing the Archive
...in Britain’s colonies, composing multi-volume tomes testifying to slave owners’ membership in a political culture based on the timeless rights of Englishmen. Following emancipation in 1838, writers of color would...
The Tryhards
...culture suffering from its fanatical embrace of a terribly misconceived system of personal advancement and power relations. Meritocracy, a kludgy term for a kludgy purpose — defending aristocratic privilege under...
First-Person Deficient
...commodity culture in full flower, a consensus defined by a democracy of material possessions rather than ideas or values. This consensus defines the present moment and weds a postindustrial U.S....
The Birth of a Beauty Criticism
...the time, the only ongoing body of beauty criticism I could find. There were individual essays and reported articles critiquing beauty culture and, of course, books on the matter. But...
Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails
...exploration? How can parents mediate between the famous Mean Girls sex-ed scene (“You will get chlamydia and die”) and the compulsory sexuality of raunch culture? How do you find a...
Cloudy Logic
...Down to Earth, a short book about the “pseudo-rationality” of mid-20th century American culture drawing on his study of “Astrological Forecasts,” the Los Angeles Times’s astrology column. Adorno uses the...
Not All Nerds
...technical professionals. It’s also during this period that the character type of the “nerd” appeared in popular culture for the first time. The nerd, keyed to facility in math and...
The Whitney Biennial for Angry Women
...the belief in the universal, a pure idea arrived at by a series of white men who have combed through culture and curated its worth. Another face we’ll call visual...
From Gender Critical to QAnon: Anti-Trans Politics and the Laundering of Conspiracy
Stated disavowal of their own bias doesn’t account for how liberals rhetorically shelter political violence
Top or Bottom: How do we desire?
What do queer memes of a top shortage reveal about the racialized orders of desire and new directions for gay critique?
Faked in China
...where unscrupulous business practices sully the intellectual property of hardworking Euro-American brand owners, or attempt to offer a “cultural” explanation—that is, a racist one, holding Chinese culture as incapable of...